The Middle-Class Money-Extraction Mechanism

The nest-egg myth … Nearly half of today’s older Americans receive no income from assets such as stocks and savings accounts. As the debate over the federal deficit heats up, Americans are going to hear a great deal about “greedy geezers” who are supposedly bankrupting the nation with Social Security and Medicare. Politicians will no doubt be more circumspect than former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson, who, as the Republican co-chairman of the federal deficit commission, described Social Security as a “milk cow with 310 million tits.” The myth underlying these attacks (including Simpson’s misogynist bovine metaphor) is that most old people don’t need their entitlements – that they are affluent pickpockets fleecing younger Americans. ~ LA Times

Dominant Social Theme: Invest wisely and well.

Free-Market Analysis: Can one “invest” one’s way to prosperity? Some people are very good at stock picking and others can use Austrian business cycle analysis to generally figure out what side of the market to be on during its great turnings (gold and silver would seem to be appropriate for now). But most people have no more success picking stocks or generally investing than they do with other parts of regulatory capitalism.

Let’s try to put this long-running power elite promotion into perspective. We don’t agree with the LA Times’ perspective (see article excerpt above). It’s not nest-egg versus Social Security (which the US cannot afford, especially because there are no SS funds, only fancy IOUs). There is a third way, which is to get rid of central banking entirely and let tortured Western economies gradually deflate.